PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Dom Giordano spoke with Mike Scippa, the Public Affairs Director of Alcohol Justice, an industry watchdog organization that supports public policies designed to prevent underage drinking, on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT.

Click below to listen to the podcast…

Mike Scippa of Alcohol Justice

Scippa voiced his support for an ad released by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1776. The ad opposes a Pennsylvania Senate bill that would expand wine and beer sales into grocery and convenience stores and claimed the amount of children killed due to alcohol abuse will rise if the law is enacted.

“The UFCW, who helped put that up, they’re speaking truth. The statistics and the research has been around for years to show that there are far fewer negative consequences of alcohol consumption in states that have some type of monopoly of the sale and distribution,” he said.

He also defended Alcohol Justice against claims that they wish to make all alcohol sales illegal.

“Big alcohol likes to paint us with that brush, just as they ignore the evidence of what privatization will really do. We’re not prohibitionists. We never have been, never will be. We don’t try to tell adults what to do in their personal lives. What we do, however, is envision healthy communities that are free of the alcohol industry’s negative impact. We do that by watch-dogging the industry and promoting evidence based public health policies,” Scippa said.

Scippa claims that the alcohol industry has saturated the market to the point where they need to dismantle laws restricting the sale of their products to make more profits.

“The only way they can squeeze money out of this product…is to go to those states where there is effective state monopoly at the moment, and tear it down. We’ve seen it happen in North Carolina. We’ve seen in happen in Washington. It flies in the face of the evidence,” he said.